Today I made one of the worst decisions in my life by taking the bus from KL to Singapore. It was supposed to take 4hrs and 55mins but took almost 10 hours.

At first, I was super impressed by the bus terminal. It has so many boarding gates so you feel like you’re going on a plane but no, it’s just plain ol’ (and very unpunctual) buses. On each gate there was a screen announcing the next departing busses and remarks like “on time” or “delayed”. You will never see as many “delayed” signs on a screen. And I couldn’t even figure out which bus was mine cos the code wasn’t printed on the ticket. Amazing bureaucracy work here. Then of course it departed late.

Okay to be fair, it’s not the bus service’s problem that it took so much more longer, it’s because too many people decided to drive into Singapore on this beautiful Sunday. Not so beautiful at the immigration.

There were more people there than at the arrival hall of the Paris CDG airport, I swear. And darn Singaporeans seem to hate all other nations, especially their neighbours. They randomly grabbed some Indonesian and Chinese nationals from the crowd and questioned them; not really sure what happened.

When it was finally my turn, they looked at my Chinese visa and German visa very closely, then kept flipping through the passport. And then an officer announced the last 4 digits of my previous passport number and the officer was like: “that means that the last time she came, she had another passport. “ Wow really, thanks for the analysis but why not just make sure that I’m not smuggling drugs into your country and let me through faster so everyone can leave earlier? I find this weirder than the “what are you doing here in my country?” questions that I got in the UK and Romania.

Made me miss crossing the European Union borders by land transport and absolutely not having to show any form of IDs.

However, the bus ride was pretty interesting:

• Two ladies almost or the same as my grandmother’s age who were beside me started chatting to me and so we became friends.
• There was a family with Canadian passports but seem to not understand English.
• There were two French people who got visibly upset after we have departed for about 6 hours and not being in Singapore yet. Apparently they were just gonna do a one day trip from KL-Singapore. Yikes. We got out to official Singapore ground at almost 7pm.
• We had to change buses, I’m not sure why.
• It’s pretty comfy so I slept through the most of the first half of the journey.